Every major problem facing humanity is exacerbated by
a needlessly ballooning human population. So why is the
explosive growth of the human family—more than sevenfold
since the Industrial Revolution and still expanding rapidly—
generally ignored by policy makers and the media? And why
has the environmental movement chosen to be mute about
the fundamental driver of species loss and the destruction
of wildlife habitats around the globe? Isn’t it time to start
speaking out about the equation that matters most to the
future of people and the planet?

Overpopulation + Overdevelopment = Overshoot

Overdevelopment, Overpopulation, Overshoot (“OVER”)
moves beyond insider debates and tired arguments (human
numbers and overconsumption are both responsible for the
crisis of population overshoot). Anchored by a series of provocative photo essays, OVER presents the stark reality of
a world transformed by human action, action that threatens
our future and the buzzing, blossoming diversity of life with
which we share the planet.

DEDICATION

To the wild beauty, ecological richness,
and cultural diversity being swept away
by the rising tide of humanity . . .
and for William R. Catton Jr.,
peerless teacher on the perils of overshoot.

Can you think of any problem in any area of human
endeavor on any scale, from microscopic to global,
whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way
aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in
population, locally, nationally, or globally?
â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Albert Bartlett

We are one human race living on one planet. We
aspire for the same things: food, water, good health, and most
of all dignity and loving relationships. We yearn for opportunity,
voice, and resources to develop our potential. We want to raise
our children in a safe and healthy environment. We want to
experience the Earth’s beauty and natural bounty.
Realizing our common humanity invites us to embrace common
responsibility and to care for one another and the planet on
which we live. The emergence of such grave global challenges
as biodiversity loss and climate change demands our urgent and
undivided attention. The health of the oceans, the air, the water,
and the land affects human health. The size of the human family
and the way that we live influence the quality of life for people
today as well as for future generations. Moreover, our numbers
and behavior profoundly affect nonhuman species, all of the
creatures with which we share this beautiful but finite planet. The
web of life that these species create is what makes the Earth
habitable and lovely.
We know that rapid population growth exacerbates social, economic,
and ecological problems—whether in rich or poor countries, north
or south. Most important, rapid population growth is a fundamental
driver of individual as well as societal problems that deny dignity,
especially to women who bear the burden of reproduction and
caretaking of communities. We have the knowledge to reduce these
burdens thoughtfully by using rights-based, culturally appropriate
ways to slow population growth while enhancing human dignity and
thoughtful development. Taking action in this way is important for
my country, Kenya, as it is for all other nations. This is what the world
needs to do today and not tomorrow.
This urgency strikes home when looking through the images in

this powerful book. Who can say, with an honest heart, that the
suffering of the Earth and millions of her children is not linked to
the exponential growth in human numbers?
I have devoted most of my professional life to advocating for and
advancing the universality of human rights, the rights of women
and girls, and the rights of poor people. I am not naïve about
either the complexity of factors affecting public policy, or about
the imbalance of power, voice, and resources across nations,
genders, generations, and cultures. Yet, I sincerely believe that
family planning is a human right that yields multiple benefits for
women, children, and poor people—ultimately for all humanity.
It helps sustain a mother’s health and gives women choices
beyond childbearing. Well-spaced children are healthier, and
fewer children per family help their parents to better support
their growth and development. All these step-by-step and oneperson-at-a-time actions add up to immense social good when
implemented on a large scale.
The core ethic that unites all of us in relation to family planning
is a respect for individual autonomy. Family planning is not about
telling people what to do but about listening to what they want.
Over 200 million couples around the world want to limit the
number of children they have, but are not using contraception,
and every woman wants and deserves a safe delivery. A safe
and legitimate way to reduce population growth is to make family
planning information and services and access to safe motherhood
universally available in a human rights framework.
While the complexities and challenges of achieving this are quite
real, the problem of rapid population growth requires that leaders
gather collective political will and implement effective policies
with the speed and commitment of resources commensurate with

the urgency and immensity of the problem. This is the right thing
to do, and it is our responsibility to future generations. We owe
our moral will to this action.
Some good practices are happening. There is global momentum
promoting and investing in girl’s education and protection from
harmful practices such child marriage. Despite pockets of
distractors, such as the Boko Haram in Northern Nigeria or the
Taliban in Pakistan that want to hinder this progress, we must
commit to giving the next generation the opportunities to fulfill
their dreams. Moving toward that future is a shared responsibility
and one that cannot be limited by geography or politics.
All of these things are possible when individuals, families,
governments, and international development organizations work
cooperatively and quickly to make family planning education
and services universally available, moving toward ensuring total
equality of opportunity for girls and women, and when everyone
works toward narrowing the economic gaps between nations.
These times call for an unprecedented level of cooperation and
common purpose among genders, cultures, peoples, and nations.
The legacy for future generations and so much of Earth’s living
heritage depends on we who are living today. Our problem is
not ignorance. We are drowning in knowledge. Perhaps we lack
discernment or else we simply are too selfish to care for the
future of those to come after us! But indeed, the world community
can act—and act quickly—when faced with major threats. Now
is the time to take the problem of overshoot seriously and to
act while we still have an opportunity to ensure that future
generations inherit a sustainable world.

Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in
our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support
system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and
in the process heal our ownâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;indeed to embrace the whole of
creation in all its diversity, beauty, and wonder.
â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Wangari Maathai

LORD MAN

A parable . . .

In the beginning the world was whole, and beauty prevailed . . .

Life begetting life, until the waters,

then the lands, were filled with creatures.

Myriad were their languages, from
Myriad
the were
nearlytheir
imperceptible
languages,song
from of
themoss
nearly
to imperceptible
the bugling ofsong
elk of moss to the bugling of elk.

Whales performed their symphonies in the deep. The sounds of life were everywhere.
Life pulsed and contracted and flourished through the ages.

After innumerableEventually,
epochs had
a being
passed,
appeared
a new creature
who learned
appeared.
to speak
This
and
ape
count.
learned
Forto
millennia
speak and
he lived
count,
well
andamong
for millennia
his wildlived
kin.
well among his wild kin.

But as his cleverness grew, so did his ambitions, until the day he declared himself ruler of all.

Believing the self-deception that his kind was sovereign
Believing
over the self-deception
others, he taught
thathis
hischildren
kind was
that
sovereign
the Earth
over
had
thebeen
others,
made
he
for Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use and profit.
taught his children that the Earth had been made for Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s use and profit.

He no longer recognized his neighbors in the community of life, instead calling them â&#x20AC;&#x153;natural resources.â&#x20AC;?

His work he named progress.

His work he named â&#x20AC;&#x153;progress.â&#x20AC;?

The old religions, which had long tied the human tribe to the other creatures in a circle of reciprocity, were forgotten.

Praise was sung incessantly to the new god, Growth.

Feigning himself Lord Man, he grew ever-more clever. He learned to
gather and burn fossil fuels made by ancient geological forces.

Praise
was
sungfault.
incessantly
to his
thenature,
new god,
It was no
oneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
Following
theGrowth.
counting ape, feigning himself Lord Man, grew ever more clever.
After he learned to gather and burn fossil fuels made by ancient geological forces,

his numbers became multitudes.

His numbers became multitudes.

As the multitudes spread across the face of the Earth, the songs of the other creatures grew fewer and fainter.

Caption Place Date Social justice rally, Cairo, Egypt

Many voices went permanently quiet, replaced by the sounds of machinesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;digging, churning, scarring the land,

driving the whales crazy with the noise.

Every day the Earth became
Every day
poorer.
the Bit
Earth
by bit,
became
it waspoorer.
transformed
Bit by bit,
by Lord
it wasManâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s
transformed
numbersbyand
Lord
actions.
Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s numbers and actions.

The seas were emptied of fish and filled with garbage.

The trees were replaced by bleeding stumps.

The trees were replaced by bleeding stumps.

The prairies were transformed into feeding factories for the ever-expanding
ever expanding human masses.

The skies filled with darkening smokestacks.

Smokestacks darkened the skies.

Theplace
No
worldwas
wassacred,
whole, no
andlandscape
beauty prevailed
safe from the insatiable creatureâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thirst for more energy to serve his God of Growth.

When the Earth cried out, showing her fever and
When
sending
the feverish
furies toEarth
communicate
cried out, her
sending
distress,
furies to communicate her distress,

the
LordLord
ManMan
ignored
denied
herher
sickness
sickness
untiluntil
it could
it could
no no
longer
longer
be be
denied.
denied.

Slowly, the scales began to fall from his eyes
Slowly,
when
thehescales
saw famine
began ravage
to fall from
the land.
his eyes when he saw famine ravage the land.

When he saw precious sources of freshwater
fresh waterdisappear.
disappearâ&#x20AC;Ś

When the longingWhen
that knawed
the longing
on his
thatspirit
gnawed
madeonhim
hisrecall
spirit so
made
many
himcreatures
recall sothat
many
had
creatures
passed into
that oblivion..
had passed into oblivion.

Bearing
Seeing the
witness
effects
to of
thehis
impacts
hubris,ofhehis
began
hubris,
to he
wonder
beganif to
hiswonder
empire ifwas
his secure.
empire was secure

his delusion weakening just enough to reveal the choice before
His delusion
him: weakened just enough to reveal the choice before him:

Two paths, one leading to abundant
an abundant
Earth,
earth,
filled
filled
withwith
birdsong;
birdsong,

Or the way ofthe
Growth,
otherâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the
with riches
way offor
Growthâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;offered
some, misery for
riches
many,
forand
some,
ultimate
miserydestruction
for many, and
for all
ultimate
his tribe.
destruction for all his tribe.

Would he restrain his numbers and rejoin the community of life as plain member and citizen?

Or attempt to engineer all the Earth to his will, heeding only the call of More?
Or attempt to engineer all the Earth to his will, heeding only the call of More?

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

INTRODUCTION

William Ryerson

Most conversations about population begin with statistics—
demographic data, fertility rates in this or that region, the
latest reports on malnutrition, deforestation, biodiversity loss,
climate change, and so on. Such data, while useful, fails to
generate mass concern about the fundamental issue affecting
the future of the Earth.
In reality, every discussion about population involves people, the
world that our children and grandchildren will live to see and the
health of the planet that supports all life. In my roles as president
of Population Media Center and CEO of the Population Institute,
I spend most of my time in developing countries, where many of
my friends and acquaintances are educated and prospering. But
I also know individuals who are homeless, unemployed, or hungry.
The vast majority of people in these societies, regardless of their
current status, do not enjoy a safety net. They live from day to day
in hopes that their economic circumstances will improve. Abstract
statistics on poverty are irrelevant to families struggling to secure
the food, water, and resources needed to sustain a decent life.
Those who blithely dismiss the challenges posed by population
growth like to say that we could physically squeeze 7 billion
people into an area the size of Texas. They don’t stop to consider
the suffering already caused by overpopulation. The population
debate is not about the maximum number of people that could
be packed onto the planet. The crucial question is: How many
people can the Earth sustain, at a reasonable standard of living,
while leaving room for the diversity of life to flourish? There is
no precise answer to this question, but the facts overwhelmingly
support one conclusion: We cannot go on the way we are going.
We are already doing severe and irreparable harm to the planet.
Something has to give.
If we cannot live sustainably with 7.2 billion people, how are we
going to support billions more by the end of this century? The
United Nations’ latest “medium-variant” projection indicates that

we could have 10.9 billion people by 2100, but that may be an
underestimation. Fertility rates in many parts of the world are
not falling as fast as previously anticipated. In some countries,
both developed and developing, fertility rates are actually on
the rise again. In 2014 the global total fertility rate—the average
number of children born to each woman during her lifetime—
was 2.5. If this rate were to remain unchanged, demographers
suggest that we could have 27 billion people on the planet by
the end of the century. Given our limited inheritance of soil,
water, and arable land, sustaining a global population of that size
is not even remotely possible.
As vividly illustrated by this book, human numbers and activity
are already destroying the planet’s ecological integrity—running
roughshod over myriad other species. But it’s not just the
environmental damage we’re inflicting that should concern us.
Equally appalling is how our actions threaten humanity’s future
prospects. We have passed a crucial tipping point. Our quest for
greater and greater material prosperity is now impoverishing future
generations. The Global Footprint Network estimates that humans
already use 150 percent of the Earth’s renewable capacity annually,
and it estimates further that by 2030 we will need “two planets” to
sustain us. Further growth simply deepens the crisis of ecological
“overshoot” as we draw down Earth’s carrying capacity, and it
comes at the direct expense of our own children and grandchildren.
Is that any kind of way to behave?
If you care about people, you must care about what we are doing
to the planet. If you care about what we are doing to the planet,
you must also care about human numbers. Given a planet with
infinite space and resources, population growth could, arguably, be
a blessing. We do not live on such a planet. However, there was a
time when the Earth and its resources appeared boundless. Some
people still adhere to that anachronistic belief. If nothing else, the
photographs in this book should shatter that illusion.

Many of us today do recognize that the Earth and its resources
are limited, yet too many people still cling to the notion that
modern science and technology will enable us to defy physical
limits. In the Middle Ages, alchemists sought in vain for a
“philosopher’s stone” that would convert base metals into gold.
They never succeeded. Why? Because what they were looking
for did not, and could not, exist, because its existence would have
violated the physical laws governing the universe.
Modern-day alchemists are trying to find ways of sustaining
perpetual growth in a finite and increasingly resource-constrained
world, searching for a scientific or technological breakthrough
that will enable us to keep growing indefinitely. Like the
philosopher’s stone, it does not exist. Our faith in breakthroughs
is misplaced, as amply demonstrated by the past three hundred
years of scientific and technological advances that have
accelerated, not slowed, the degradation of the natural world.
Even if scientists were to develop a relatively cheap, abundant,
and clean form of energy that powered continuous economic
and population growth, it would only accelerate the rate at
which humanity is destroying the ecological systems that make
the planet habitable. In the meantime, while we are waiting for
magical breakthroughs, we are in a headlong race to extract and
consume fossil fuels at whatever the cost to the Earth. Scientists
warn that we will fry the planet if we burn all the world’s known
reserves of coal, gas, and oil, but that concern has not slowed
the relentless exploration for more fossil fuels. An ever-expanding
human population and rising demand for products and services
makes humanity’s hunger for fossil fuels utterly insatiable.
Some cling to the notion that we can achieve sustainability by
reducing consumption in the overdeveloped world. As meritorious
as that idea may be, it has no critical mass of support. A growing
number of political leaders are supporting the idea of “greener” or
“smarter” growth, but there is not a single politician of significant
stature in the world calling for slower economic growth, no growth
(a steady-state economy), or de-growth. Yes, there are individuals
who are trying to reduce their carbon and ecological “footprints,”
but their numbers, for the moment, are dwarfed by the growing

numbers of people who want to expand their ecological footprint
through additional consumption.
Much of humanity, of course, desperately needs a larger share
of Earth’s resources. More than 2 billion people in the world live
on less than $2 per day. Nearly a billion people go to bed hungry
every night. About half the people in the world do not have
access to toilets or other means of modern sanitation. I do not
know of anyone who would deny these people a better quality
of life, but if world population continues to grow as currently
projected, many, if not most, of these people will never have their
most basic needs realized, let alone fulfill their aspirations. The
world is not that bountiful. I wish it were, but it is not.
If we have any hope of bringing about a genuine balance
between what humans demand of nature and what nature can
reasonably provide for humanity, we must take crucial steps.
Starting with the first step, we must devote more resources to
preventing unplanned pregnancies through expanded access
to contraceptives. Women everywhere should have the means
to time, limit, or space their pregnancies. But greater access to
contraceptives alone will not suffice. In those countries where
population growth is most rapid today, girls and women lack
reproductive choice; they live in traditionally male-dominated
societies where large families are still the norm. Large-family
norms, misinformation, and cultural barriers account for most
decisions to not use contraception. If we do not enable girls to
remain in school and delay marriage until adulthood, provide
accurate information, and empower women in the developing
world, then we will have failed countless individuals. Moreover,
in the face of this humanitarian failure, fertility rate declines may
continue only very slowly, or not at all—but certainly not fast
enough to avoid the kind of human suffering that results when
countries are overpopulated.
In many parts of the world, child marriage is still prevalent. It
is estimated that some 14,000 girls become child brides each
day. In some areas, particularly poor rural communities, parents
require their daughters—who have not yet reached puberty—to

wed men who are twice or three times their age. Child brides do
not enjoy reproductive choice in any meaningful sense. Most are
condemned, if they survive childbirth, to having many children,
and their families are condemned, in turn, to a life of continued
poverty and deprivation.
As important as it is to reduce unplanned pregnancies in
the developing world, it is just as important to do so in the
overdeveloped world, where the per capita consumption of
resources is so much greater. Nearly half of all pregnancies in
the United States are unplanned, and while America’s teenage
pregnancy rate is declining, it remains the highest among
industrialized nations. Shockingly, several state legislatures in
recent years have slashed support for family planning, resulting in
dozens of clinics having to either close their doors or limit services.
These individual and community-level actions, in aggregate, have
global consequences. The leading scientists of the world are
concerned that we are approaching as many as nine planetary
tipping points, which, if surpassed, would cause irreparable harm
to the environment and the well-being of future generations. We
have already crossed one boundary in terms of greenhouse gas
emissions; the climate is changing, and we have already inflicted
incalculable harm on posterity as a result.
Because of population growth and changing diets, the world’s
demand for food is projected to rise by 70–100 percent over the
next forty years. No one knows how we will meet that demand.
Cultivated farmlands already occupy a land mass the size of
South America, and ranchlands used for livestock grazing occupy
a land mass the size of Africa. There’s very little arable land left;
most of it is in the form of tropical forests, which if cut down to
expand agriculture would accelerate biodiversity loss and further
complicate efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions.
Water scarcity in many parts of the world has already reached
crisis proportions. Demand for water is expected to outstrip
supply by 40 percent within the next twenty years. As one
research organization put it, we will need the equivalent of 20

Nile Rivers—which we do not have—to meet demand. By 2030, an
estimated 3.9 billion people, nearly half the world’s population, will
be living in areas of high water stress.
We live today in a “Catch 22” world, where addressing one urgent
problem often exacerbates another. If we double food production
to feed a growing world, we expand greenhouse gas emissions.
If we discover and exploit more fossil fuels, we fry the planet. If
we reduce our water consumption, we curtail our food production.
If we grow the world’s middle class, we increase the pressure on
Earth’s natural ecosystems.
There is, however, one exception to our “Catch 22” world,
and that concerns population. Viewed from almost any angle,
addressing population is a win-win proposition. By empowering
girls and women in the developing world and expanding family
planning services and information everywhere, we produce a
world of good: Fertility rates decline; maternal and child health
improve; food security increases; poverty decreases; education
and economic opportunities expand; and degradation of the
environment is curtailed.
In discussions about family planning and its many benefits, the
health of nature is often an afterthought. Far too often it is
overlooked entirely. We tend to see the well-being of people as
somehow distinct from the well-being of the Earth. Some even
see the environment as being in “competition” with humans. The
obvious truth, although unacknowledged by some, is that we
are not separate or distinct from nature. Our hopes and our fate
are inextricably linked to the fate of the natural world. We are
part of a complex web of interdependent life, and our welfare
depends upon the health of the whole. When life took hold on
this planet it produced millions of species that have lived and
evolved and produced both wondrous beauty and diversity. We
modern humans are both products of and beneficiaries of that
evolutionary process.
We are, however, acting as ungrateful beneficiaries. Scientists tell
us that we are exterminating our fellow plant and animal species

at a rate that is a hundred or even a thousand times faster
than the natural rate of extinction. Leading biologists now warn
that human numbers and activity are triggering the “sixth mass
extinction,” the largest since the dinosaurs were wiped out 65
million years ago.
As a young man, after earning undergraduate and graduate
degrees in biology with a specialization in ecology and evolution,
my interest in moths and butterflies was so strong that I seriously
considered becoming a lepidopterist. Many of the species that
piqued my interest as a college student are now in danger of
becoming extinct. Even the common Danaus plexippus, otherwise
known as the monarch butterfly, is fast approaching endangered
status. Its winter habitat in Mexico has shrunk dramatically.
Biologists warn that herbicide use is decreasing availability of the
milkweed plants, limiting a primary food source for monarchs and
thus diminishing their numbers.
But it’s not just the monarch butterfly that is imperiled. Every
year there are fresh reports about the senseless slaughter of
elephants, rhinos, lions, tigers, and other “megafauna.” Some
of their population decline is attributable to poachers seeking
to harvest ivory or other body parts, but much of the dramatic
decline has been caused by an ever-increasing loss of habitat.
Many of these animals live in areas, like sub-Saharan Africa,
where human fertility rates equate to a doubling of the human
population every thirty or forty years.
In my college days, we were taught that, since the end of the
last Ice Age about 12,000 years ago, humans have been living
in the Holocene Epoch, but our impact upon the planet and its
environment has become so great that some geologists today
suggest we change the epoch’s name to the “Anthropocene,” or
“Age of Man.” To most scientists, that development is a frightening
prospect; it means that we are changing the planet—for the
worse—on a global scale. Some scientists, though a distinct
minority, insist that we can “manage” this change; that we can
strike a balance with nature that will allow us to feed, clothe,
and meet the economic aspirations of an additional 3 or 4 billion

people moving forward. As well illustrated by the photographs in
this book, that line of thought reflects the worst kind of wishful
thinking. Our 7.2 billion on the planet are already doing grave
harm to the biosphere. Several decades ago, a cartoon character
named “Pogo” made popular the oft-quoted saying: “We have
met the enemy and he is us.” We might say this today in regards
to the challenge the world faces, only it’s not a comic matter. If
we are to reduce severe poverty, defeat hunger, and bring about
a sustainable world, we must achieve change on a global scale,
beyond just our consumption habits, and that change must begin
with us. This conviction led me to work for the Population Institute
more than forty years ago and subsequently spurred me to
establish the Population Media Center fifteen years ago.
Despite the widespread belief that simply making contraceptives
more widely available can stabilize world population, there are
other reasons why women in the developing world end up having
more children than they might otherwise desire, as revealed
through the Demographic and Health Surveys supported by
USAID (United States Agency for International Development). In
reality, many of these women have no reproductive choice. Child
brides often have nothing to say about how many of their own
children they will have or when. Some women abstain from using
contraceptives because of misinformation or blatant lies about
the possible side effects or risks of using modern methods of
contraception. Still other women have more children than they
want because of fatalism, or religious teachings, or insistent inlaws who want more grandchildren.
At the Population Media Center (PMC) we create long-running
serial dramas (soap operas) that serve to educate women about
their contraceptive choices. Using a methodology based upon the
“social learning” theories of the great Stanford psychologist Albert
Bandura and the programs developed by Miguel Sabido, the vice
president of Televisa in Mexico, we work with in-country teams to
develop long-running dramas, generally broadcast via radio, that
provide positive role models for men and women in the developing
world. Our listening audiences learn from popular “transitional”
characters who are torn between good and bad influences. In the

process the characters and the listening audience discover the
benefits of family planning and small family norms.

population at 8.3 billion and then begin a gradual reduction in the
total number of humans on the planet as soon as 2050.

Our programs also address the deeper social stereotypes that
demean women and effectively deny them reproductive choice.
When girls are educated, women are empowered, and gender
equity is achieved, women tend to have smaller, healthier families.
By changing attitudes and behavior toward girls and women
we can improve their lives, the well-being of their families, and
prospects for the planet and our posterity.
At PMC we also use the “Sabido methodology,” as it is now
known, to achieve positive social change with respect to
environmental conservation. In Rwanda, our radio programs have
encouraged farmers to participate in reforestation programs
aimed at restoring natural habitats and preserving the land for
future generations. Similarly, we can use our programs to alter
harmful consumption patterns or promote sustainable agricultural
practices. The potential is enormous.

If we can hew to the United Nations’ low variant demographic
projection, by 2100 global population would be back down to
6.7 billion—more than 4 billion fewer than can be expected in
the business-as-usual, medium variant projection of the human
population trajectory. Such numbers may seem incomprehensible
but the reality is that these two possible futures—one of 6 billion
versus 10 billion humans to feed, clothe, educate, and employ—
is the difference between a world of scarcity and nightmarish
suffering for much of humanity and a world in which it may be
possible to balance the needs of people and nature. Put another
way, a population difference of 4 billion—the result of either
staying complacent or working hard to share family planning tools
and information around the globe—is 47 percent more than the
current combined populations of North America, Central America,
South America, Oceania, Europe, and Africa (2.7 billion)!

While the obstacles before humanity are real, we should
be careful not to overestimate the difficulty of following the
path of the United Nations’ lowest population projections, which
show a possible global stabilization as soon as the year 2050.
Achieving this stabilization is a challenge, but it is far from an
insurmountable one. The United Nations estimates that it would
cost an additional $3.5 billion per year to provide contraceptive
information and services to the more than 220 million women in
the developing world who want to avoid a pregnancy but who are
not using a modern method of contraception. (That’s less than
4 percent of what Americans spend on beer each year.) That’s
a very small price to pay for a more sustainable world. Combine
that investment with efforts through entertainment mass media
and other means to change attitudes and behavior towards girls
and women in the developing world, and we can stabilize world

While I am deeply concerned about the future of humanity and
the planet, I’m not a pessimist. It’s not too late. There are things
that we can do to achieve a harmonious world and many of
the steps that are required, like PMC’s radio programs, do not
require an enormous investment of resources. Time, however, is
beginning to run out.
Given the central role that population dynamics will play in
determining the welfare of future generations, what the world
needs today is a wake-up call. This book is that wake-up call.
The photographs to follow are emotionally jarring. The thoughts
expressed herein are not reassuring; they are deeply provocative.
But that is the nature of wake-up calls. The way that human
numbers and behavior are transforming the Earth, undermining its
ability to support the human family and the rest of life, is apparent
for all to see. The reality of this urgent moment calls us to think,
to care, and to act.

Demographic
Explosion

With a present human population that has surged past 7 billion and is
growing fast, most people assume that rapid population growth is normal.
Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s not. During almost all of human history, our numbers have been either
stable or growing imperceptibly (less than 1/500th of 1 percent according to a leading demographer). Population growth ticked up significantly
after the invention of agriculture, but the rate of increase was still only a
small fraction of 1 percent. Then, around the start of the Industrial Revolution some two centuries ago, a convergence of factors set the stage for
a demographic explosion. Most notably, humans began to exploit the vast
fossil-energy storehouse laid down by ancient geological forcesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;coal,
oil, and natural gas. The modern eraâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s exploitation of this energy windfall
has coincided with a suite of rapid advances in agricultural productivity,
science, and medicine that have lowered death rates and increased life
spans, leading to ballooning human populations around the globe.

HI-RES
MISSING

Neither prosperity nor a just and egalitarian social order can by themselves cause the number of children per couple
to go down to two. They are only favourable conditions. For the actual task of limiting the number of children to two,
the couples must consciously do somethingâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;either on their own initiative or urged by the society. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Saral Sarkar

Child marriage happens because adults believe they have the right to impose marriage upon a child. This
denies children, particularly girls, their dignity and the opportunity to make choices that are central to their
lives, such as when and whom to marry or when to have children. Choices define us and allow us to realize
our potential. Child marriage robs girls of this chance. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Graca MaĂ§hel

India

Of all the fantasies indulged in by a society speeding toward self-destruction, none is as consequential as the idea
that continuing growth—both in size of population and size of economy—has a happy-ever-after ending. —Craig Durian

South Korea

The command “Be fruitful and multiply” was promulgated, according to our authorities,
when the population of the world consisted of two people. —William Ralph Inge

U.S.A.

HUMAN TIDE

It is through the sheer mass of a mass society, not simply
from malevolence, that the rising human tide has become
deadly to the rest of life. The collective weight of a bloated
humanity has dire ecological and social consequences.
Every pressing problem, from poverty and malnutrition to
biodiversity loss and climate change, is linked to human
numbers and behavior. In aggregate, the prosaic actions
of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;eating, manufacturing, polluting, shopping, warringâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;have made our species the functional equivalent of a
geological force, able to affect even the global life support
systems and climate in which our species evolved.

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

One of the great challenges today is the population explosion. Unless we area able to tackle this issue
effectively we will be confronted with the problem of the natural resources being inadequate for all the
human beings on this earth. . . . The only choiceâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;limited number . . . happy life . . . meaningful life. Too many . . .
miserable life and always bullying one another, exploiting one another. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;His Holiness the Dalai Lama

Caption Place Date Social justice rally,
Berlin,
Cairo,
Germany
Egypt

The chief cause for the impending collapse of the world—the cause sufficient in and by
itself—is the enormous growth of the human population: the human flood. —Pentti Linkola

Pyongyang, North Korea

The question of how many people the world can support is unanswerable in a finite sense.
What do we want? Are there global limits, absolute limits beyond which we cannot go without
catastrophe or overwhelming costs? There are, most certainly. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;George Woodwell

Srinagar, India

We have geared the machines and locked all together into interdependence; we have built the
great cities; now there is no escape. We have gathered vast populations incapable of free survival,
insulated from the strong earth, each person in himself helpless, on all dependent. The circle is
closed, and the net is being hauled in. They hardly feel the cords drawing . . . â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Robinson Jeffers

Beijing, China

URBAN ANIMAL

Humans evolved in wild nature. Only relatively recently in our time
on Earth, roughly ten to twelve millennia ago, did we begin to
domesticate other speciesâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and ourselves. That first agricultural
revolution set humanity on a trajectory of population growth and
settlement-based land use. Increased social organization and the
invention of cities went hand in hand to allow development of increasingly complex economic and political systems. In 2008, for
the first time in history, the majority of humans on Earth lived in
cities. We had become, at least superficially, urban animals.

Caption Place Date Social justice rally,
New
Cairo,
Delhi,Egypt
India

Faced with a world that can support either a lot of us consuming a lot less or far fewer of us consuming more,
weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re deadlocked: individuals, governments, the media, scientists, environmentalists, economists, human rights
workers, liberals, conservatives, business and religious leaders. On the supremely divisive question of the ideal
size of the human family, weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;re amazingly united in a pact of silence. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Julia Whitty

The problem of rapidly increasing numbers in relation to natural resources, to social stability and
to the well-being of individualsâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;this is now the central problem of mankind. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Aldous Huxley

If our species had started with just two people at the time of the earliest agricultural practices some 10,000 years ago, and
increased by 1 percent per year, today humanity would be a solid ball of flesh many thousand light years in diameter, and
expanding with a radial velocity that, neglecting relativity, would be many times faster than the speed of light. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Gabor Zovanyi

American suburbia represents the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. The far-flung
housing subdivisions, commercial highway strips, big-box stores, and all the other furnishings and accessories
of extreme car dependence will function poorly, if at all, in an oil-scarce future. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;James Howard Kunstler

Creation destroys as it goes, throws down one tree for another. But . . . mankind would abolish death, multiply itself million upon
million, rear up city upon city, save every parasite alive, until the accumulation of mere existence is swollen to a horror. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;D.H. Lawrence

Caption Place Date Social justice rally,
Qingdao,
Cairo, Egypt
China

Squatters trade physical safety and public health for a few square meters of land and some security against
eviction. They are the pioneer settlers of swamps, floodplains, volcano slopes, unstable hillsides, rubbish
mountains, chemical dumps, railroad sidings, and desert fringes. . . . Such sites are povertyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s niche in the ecology
of the city, and very poor people have little choice but to live with disaster. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Mike Davis

Poor and populous countries, such as Pakistan, parts of India and much of Africa, are experiencing very rapid
population growth, driven by a combination of high birth rates and falling death rates as development and aid
reduce mortality. The consequence is that individuals and countries experience real difficulty in escaping their
situation of grinding poverty as increasing populations compete for limited resources. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Simon Ross

Caption Place Date Social justice rally, Mumbai,
Cairo, Egypt
India

Not until man sees the light and submits gracefully, moderating his homocentricity; not until man accepts the primacy of
beauty, diversity, and integrity of nature, and limits his domination and numbers, placing equal value on the preservation
of natural environments as on his own life, is there hope that he will survive. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Hugh H. Iltis

Caption Place Date Social justice rally,Aleppo,
Cairo, Egypt
Syria

Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Kenneth Boulding

Human agriculture and industry are embedded in and supported by the natural ecosystems of Earth.â&#x20AC;Ś
Yet modern societies heedlessly displace, poison, overharvest, and directly assault natural ecosystems
with little thought for their importance in their own sustenance. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Paul and Anne Ehrlich

Caption Place Date Social justice rally, Cairo,
Miami,Egypt
U.S.A.

ELBOW TO ELBOW

Megacities, gigantic concentrations of people and their artifacts, now dot multiple continents. Generally defined as urban agglomerations of more than 10
million people, megacities such as Tokyo, Delhi, Shanghai, and S達o Paulo are
fueled by resources stripped from the far corners of the globe. The megacities of the developing world are often ringed by sprawling slums populated by
people newly arrived from the countryside. Some may find economic opportunity; all will find crowding, congestion, and pollution.

TAIWAN

Time and space—time to be alone, space to move about—they may well become the great scarcities of tomorrow. —Edwin Way Teale

Vietnam

In the last 200 years the population of our planet has grown exponentially, at a rate of 1.9% per year. If it continued at this rate,
with the population doubling every 40 years, by 2600 we would all be standing literally shoulder to shoulder. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Stephen Hawking

China

We will find neither national purpose nor personal satisfaction in a mere continuation
of economic progress, in an endless amassing of worldly goods. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Robert F. Kennedy

U.S.A.

The immediate relief problems and earthquake casualties would be much less with a smaller population. The size of population
now, with the scale of the problems it creates, leads to an increasingly chaotic situation. More population exacerbates any
efforts needed to solve humanity’s problems, anywhere, be they immediate or long term. —Walter Youngquist

HAITI

Unlike plagues of the dark ages or contemporary diseases we do not yet understand, the modern
plague of overpopulation is soluble by means we have discovered and with resources we possess.
What is lacking is not sufficient knowledge of the solution but universal consciousness of the
gravity of the problem and education of the billions who are its victims. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Martin Luther King Jr.

Bangladesh

Why, in heavenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s name, should anyone suppose that mere quantity of human organisms is a good thing, irrespective
either of their own inherent quality or the quality of their life and their experiences? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Julian Huxley

China

The defining fact of this historical moment is the reality of exponential growth. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Lisi Krall

Philippines

FEEDING FRENZY

To live, every creature must eat. Supplying the food needs of 7 billion people
has proven elusive thus far, despite dramatic intensification of agricultural production in the last century. The aggregate “footprint” of agriculture is massive:
United Nations data suggest that some 5 billion hectares (more than 19 million square miles) of Earth’s land surface are used for croplands and livestock
grazing. Despite that huge area converted from wild habitat to feed humankind,
nearly a billion people are hungry and another billion persist tenuously, where
a small shift in their circumstances would put them at risk of starvation. Across
the globe, traditional village-scale agriculture—typically diversified and for local consumption—is being displaced by industrial monocultures grown for the
export market. Irrigation is depleting aquifers and dewatering rivers. Livestock
production is increasingly dominated by animal factories, concentrated animal
feeding operations (CAFOs), which are an ecological and ethical tragedy.

brazil

Assimilation . . . proceeds by biotic cleansing and the impoverishment of others: using up the soil and
poisoning it; putting the fear of God into the animals such that they cower or flee in our presence; renaming
fish “fisheries,” animals “livestock,” trees “timber,” and rivers “freshwater” so as to conceptually ground the
human enterprise’s extermination and commodification ventures. The impact of assimilation is relentless,
and it is grounded in the experience of alienation and the attitude of entitlement. —Eileen Crist

West Kansas, U.S.A.

HI-RES
MISSING

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial
empire—a crackpot machine—that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage.
Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. —Edward Abbey

SPAIN

Why should we tolerate a diet of weak poisons, a home in insipid surroundings, a circle of
acquaintances who are not quite our enemies, the noise of motors with just enough relief to prevent
insanity? Who would want to live in a world which is just not quite fatal? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Rachel Carson

NICARAGUA

Globalization, which attempts to amalgamate every local, regional, and national
economy into a single world system, requires homogenizing . . . locally adapted
forms of agriculture, replacing them with an industrial systemâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;centrally managed,
pesticide-intensive, one-crop production for exportâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;designed to deliver a narrow
range of transportable foods to the world market. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Helena Norberg-Hodge

China

We stand, in most places on earth, only six inches from desolation, for that is the thickness
of the topsoil level upon which the entire life of the planet depends. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;R. Neil Sampson

MADAGASCAR

Despite the industryâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s spin, CAFOs [concentrated animal feeding operations] are not the only way to raise livestock
and poultry. Thousands of farmers and ranchers integrate crop production, pastures, or forages with livestock and
poultry to balance nutrients within their operations and minimize off-farm pollution through conservation practices
and land management. . . . Yet these sustainable producers, who must compete with factory farms for market share,
receive comparatively little or no public funding for their sound management practices. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Martha Noble

Brazil

The principle of confinement in so-called animal science is derived from the industrial version of efficiency. The designers
of animal factories appear to have had in mind the example of concentration camps or prisons, the aim of which is to house
and feed the greatest numbers in the smallest space at the least expense of money, labor, and attention. To subject innocent
creatures to such treatment has long been recognized as heartless. Animal factories make an economic virtue of heartlessness
toward domestic animals, to which we humans owe instead a large debt of respect and gratitude. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Wendell Berry

CANADA

The billions of animals that are slaughtered and disassembled each year throughout the factory
farm system are viewed as little more than profitable commodities and production units. . . .
This mechanistic mindset about farm animals is even encoded in our laws. The important
protections against cruelty and mistreatment in our federal Animal Welfare Act apply to pets,
exhibition animals, and research animals, but not to our farm animals. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Andrew Kimbrell

u.s.a.

idaho, u.s.a.

The greatness of a nation and its moral progress can be judged by the way its animals are treated. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Mohandas K. Gandhi

china

OVERSHOOT

In ecology, the term overshoot describes the phenomenon of a species becoming so numerous that it outstrips its habitat. Overshoot leads to diminished carrying
capacity, typically followed by a population crash. It is
widely acknowledged by ecologists that humanity has
overshot the carrying capacity of Earth and is drawing
down the â&#x20AC;&#x153;natural capitalâ&#x20AC;? that the ecosphere provides.
Poverty and malnutrition may be indicators of ecological
overshoot. War, corruption, cultural legacies such as colonialism, and other factors certainly contribute to famine and other social problems, but one can clearly see
overshoot in the degraded landscapes where humanity
has eliminated wild nature and reduced the landâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s productivity. It is also evident in depleted stocks of formerly
abundant fish, and in the faces of hungry children.

SUdan

Throughout history human exploitation of the earth has produced this progression: colonize—destroy—move on. —Garrett Hardin

AMAZON

Any area of land will support in perpetuity only a limited number of people. An absolute limit is imposed by
soil and climatic factors in so far as these are beyond human control, and a practical limit is set by the way in
which the land is used. If this practical limit of population is exceeded, without a compensating change in the
system of land usage, then a cycle of degenerative changes is set in motion which must result in deterioration
or destruction of the land and ultimately in hunger and reduction of the population. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;William Allan

Somalia

A population and economy are in overshoot mode when they are drawing resources or emitting pollutants
at an unsustainable rate, but the stresses on the support system are not yet strong enough to reduce the
rates of withdrawal or emission. Overshoot comes from delays in feedbackâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;from the fact that decision
makers in the system do not get, or believe, or act upon the information that limits have been exceeded
until long after they have been exceeded. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Donella Meadows, Denis Meadows, and JĂ¸rgen Randers

PAKISTAN

Too many people brings suffering to the land, and the land returns its suffering to the people. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;O. Soemarwoto

MALI

In absolute numbers, more illiterate, impoverished, and chronically malnourished people
live in the world at the end of the twentieth century than at the beginning. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Marvin Harris

TURKEY

MATERIAL WORLD

The sheer volume of raw materials that must be mined, refined, processed, transported, manufactured into products to service billions of people (and eventually disposed) almost defies imagination. It is not, however, incalculable. Efforts to gather
such data have become increasingly sophisticated and, when combined with various
assessments as part of “ecological footprint” analysis, can offer a broadly representative picture of humanity’s global impact. The picture isn’t pretty. From cradle
to grave, as raw materials are transformed into products, this process of “material
throughput” causes ecological damage. Behind that damage to the Earth is the idea
of perpetual economic growth being synonymous with progress. In the overdeveloped world, a ubiquitous advertising industry fuels an ethic of hyperconsumption.
In the developing world, the grave problems of poverty and social inequity are frequently met not with programs to strengthen traditional community structures but
with ill-conceived efforts to “modernize” and to turn citizens into participants of an
ever-expanding, global consumer society.

singapore

This attempt to “green” the industry . . . somehow, they can convince young people not just to consume
but to consume more responsibly; that’s the latest idea that the advertising industry has come up with to
save themselves. . . . There is a fundamental contradiction that they still haven’t come to grips with. And
that fundamental contradiction is that we don’t need to consume any more, we don’t need a five-hundred
billion- dollar-a-year industry telling us to consume more. We already consume enough. —Kalle Lasn

TOKYO, japan

In the developing world, the problem of population is seen less as a matter of human numbers than of Western
overconsumption. Yet within the development community, the only solution to the problems of the developing world
is to export the same unsustainable economic model fueling the overconsumption of the West.â&#x20AC;? â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Kavita Ramdas

kolkata, INDIA

That which seems to be wealth may in verity only be the gilded index of far-reaching ruin. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;John Ruskin

HONG KONG

Consumerism is not an ahistorical trait of human nature but a specific product of capitalism. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Juliet B. Schor

U.S.A.
india

There are some things in the world we can’t change—gravity, entropy, the speed of light, and our biological
nature that requires clean air, clean water, clean soil, clean energy and biodiversity for our health and wellbeing.
Protecting the biosphere should be our highest priority or else we sicken and die. Other things, like capitalism,
free enterprise, the economy, currency, the market, are not forces of nature, we invented them. They are not
immutable and we can change them. It makes no sense to elevate economics above the biosphere. —David Suzuki

UNITED KINGDOM

Some people continue to defend trickle-down theories which assume that economic growth, encouraged by a free market,
will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world. This opinion, which has never been
confirmed by the facts, expresses a crude and naĂŻve trust in the goodness of those wielding economic power and in the
sacralized workings of the prevailing economic system. Meanwhile, the excluded are still waiting. To sustain a lifestyle which
excludes others, or to sustain enthusiasm for that selfish ideal, a globalization of indifference has developed. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Pope Francis

CHINA

TRASHING
THE PLANET

An increasingly globalized industrial economy strips raw materials from
every corner of the globe, delivers them where manufacturing or processing costs are cheapest, and ships the resulting products to distant markets. This economic activity, crisscrossing the Earth in a web of transport
routes, is based on abundant cheap energy. Every step generates waste—
some of which is dumped into the atmosphere as air pollution; some into
local waterways; some into the ground. A culture that treats the Earth as
a commodity, as merely a storehouse of resources for human use, is a
throwaway culture producing throwaway stuff. That culture’s legacy is the
endless stream of solid waste—trash—that ends up heaped in landfills,
scattered across the landscape, or adrift in massive trash gyres at sea.

china

Put simply, if we do not redirect our extraction and production systems and change the way we distribute, consume, and dispose
of our Stuff—what I sometimes call the take-make-waste model—the economy as it is will kill the planet. —Annie Leonard

bangladesh

Since survival is nothing if not biologicalâ&#x20AC;Ś perpetuating economic or political institutions at the expense of
biological well-being of man, societies, and ecosystems may be considered maladaptive. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Roy Rappaport
IVORY COAST

The hungry world cannot be fed until and unless the growth of its resources and the growth
of its population come into balance. Each man and woman—and each nation—must make
decisions of conscience and policy in the face of this great problem. —Lyndon B. Johnson

guatemala

Even as a waste disposal site, the world is finite. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;William R. Catton Jr.

ghana

The laws of thermodynamics restrict all technologies, man’s as well as nature’s, and apply to all economic systems whether
capitalist, communist, socialist, or fascist. We do not create or destroy (produce or consume) anything in a physical sense—
we merely transform or rearrange. And the inevitable cost of arranging greater order in one part of the system (the human
economy) is creating a more than offsetting amount of disorder elsewhere (the natural environment). —Herman E. Daly

u.s.a.

Water and air, the two essential fluids on which all life depends, have become global garbage cans. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jacques-Yves Cousteau

Java, Indonesia

Nature’s
Unraveling

Five deep contractions in life’s diversity are recorded in the
fossil record, the last occurring 65 million years ago when
the dinosaurs went extinct. Those previous mass extinction
events were all precipitated by natural causes. The sixth, and
current, great extinction is caused by humanity’s destruction
of intact habitat, overkilling of wildlife, and climate disruption. Nature’s death is by a thousand cuts—from deforestation, livestock overgrazing, conversion of wild habitat to agriculture, industrial development, mining, pollution, spread of
invasive species, energy extraction in myriad forms, etc. The
cuts come from many blades, but the result is the same: biological impoverishment as ecosystems are degraded and native species are lost. Moreover, each of these nicks on nature
represents the loss of wild beauty. Because humanity depends on healthy ecosystems for clean air and water, fertile
soil, and pollination services, the unraveling of nature should
alarm every human being on Earth.

Human domination over nature is quite simply an illusion, a passing dream by a naive species.
It is an illusion that has cost us much, ensnared us in our own designs, given us a few boasts
to make about our courage and genius, but all the same it is an illusion. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Donald Worster

CANADA

In an interconnected world, the decision to bear a child isn’t only a personal matter, nor does it pertain only
to one’s moment. Won’t even the wanted, cared-for children feel betrayed to discover (assuming that such
thoughts are still thinkable in the future) that previous generations ignored the problem of overpopulation
and dodged the difficult choices in favor of a comfortable, conventional existence whose price included
migratory songbirds, large mammals, old- growth forests, and polar ice shelves? —Stephanie Mills

186

BRAZIL

188

I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t understand why when we destroy something created by man we call it vandalism,
but when we destroy something created by nature we call it progress. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Ed Begley, Jr.

U.S.A.

Do you think you can take over the universe and improve it? I do not believe it can be done.
The universe is sacred. You cannot improve it. If you try to change it, you will ruin it. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Lao Tsu

MIR MINE, RUSSIA

192

Our primordial spontaneities, which give us a delight in existence and enable us to interact creatively
with natural phenomena, are being stifled. Somehow we have become autistic. We donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t hear the
voices. We are not entranced with the universe, with the natural world. We are entranced instead with
domination over the natural world, with bringing about violent transformation. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Thomas Berry

indonesia

If you’re overfishing at the top of the food chain, and acidifying the ocean at the bottom, you’re
creating a squeeze that could conceivably collapse the whole system. —Carl Safina

Atlantic Ocean

Wildlife Lost

Humanity’s burgeoning numbers and selfish behavior now being the cause
of the other species’ extinction is the clearest marker that our present
course is both unsustainable and unethical. Even while 95 percent of scientifically described species have yet to be analyzed for their conservation
status, the IUCN (International Union for Conservation of Nature), which
tracks the status of imperiled species around the globe, lists some 20,000
species that are threatened with extinction. Given the relative paucity of
data about various groups of organisms, the actual number of species on
the cusp of oblivion is certainly far larger, and numerous scientific studies
have noted the accelerating trend of biodiversity loss. Humanity’s assault
on wildlife isn’t new, but 7+ billion people armed with advanced technology—from bottom-scouring trawlers that mine the seas of fish, to endocrine-disrupting chemicals that affect wild species’ reproductive success,
to violent poachers decimating elephants for their ivory tusks—are simply
more lethal to wildlife now than at any point in human history.

kenya

The massive growth of the human population through the 20th century has
had more impact on biodiversity than any other single factor. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Sir David King

gabon

There is a terribly terrestrial mindset about what we need to do to take care of the planet—as if the
ocean somehow doesn’t matter or is so big, so vast that it can take care of itself, or that there is nothing
that we could possibly do that we could harm the ocean...We are learning otherwise. —Sylvia Earle

Pacific Ocean

Except for giant meteorite strikes or other such catastrophes, Earth has never experienced anything
like the contemporary human juggernaut. We are in a bottleneck of overpopulation and wasteful
consumption that could push half of Earthâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s species to extinction in this century. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;E. O. Wilson

Hong Kong

A country can cut down its forests, erode its soils, pollute its aquifers and hunt its wildlife and fisheries to extinction, but
its measured income is not affected as these assets disappear. Impoverishment is taken for progress. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Robert Repetto

U.S.A.

The mountain gorilla faces grave danger of extinction, primarily because of the encroachments of
native man upon its habitat—and neglect by civilized man, who does not conscientiously protect
even the limited areas now allotted for the gorilla’s survival. —Dian Fossey

uganda

Less than 3,500 tigers (Panthera tigris) now occur in the wild, occupying less than 7 percent of
their historical range . . . . With the tiger we are witnessing the tragic winking out of one of the
planetâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most beloved animals across its range, one population at a time. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Elizabeth L. Bennett

INDIA

In the relations of man with the animals, with the flowers, with the objects of creation,
there is a great ethic, scarcely perceived as yet, which will at length break forth into the
light and which will be the corollary and complement to human ethics. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Victor Hugo

Antarctica

We need another and a wiser and perhaps more mystical concept of animals. . . . They are
not brethren, they are no underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the
net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Henry Beston

CHINA,

Surely the fate of human beings is like that of the animals; the same fate awaits them
both: As one dies, so dies the other. All have the same breath . . . â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Bible, Ecclesiastes 3:19

midway island

Perhaps we can adapt to global warming, and perhaps we can survive a mass
extinction even of species on land. But I know one thing to be an ecological
certainty and that is if we kill the oceansâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;we kill ourselves. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Captain Paul Watson

Caption Place Date Social justice rally, Cairo,
DENMARK
Egypt

Of the 250,000 species of plants that share our world, three quarters rely on wild pollinators to reproduce. Wherever
you live, look around and see a world engineered by these pollinators. Then look around and see a world in distress.
Honeybees may have been filling in for wild pollinators to bolster our agriculture, but they can’t do much for the other
249,900 species of flowering plants. That’s up to the native bugs. And while evidence is hard to come by, many of these
species are failing under the triple threats of habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, and exotics. —Rowan Jacobsen

ENERGY blight

Modern, techno-industrial society runs on energyâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;massive amounts of
inexpensive, continuously available power generated primarily from fossil
fuels. Around 1800, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the global
human population was roughly 1 billion. It had taken our entire lifetime
as a species to reach that milestone. In the subsequent two centuries,
the human population has grown more than sevenfold, and energy use
per capita has increased by more than thirty times. Clearly, as a species
we have gotten tremendously clever at deploying energy resources to
support population and economic growth. But at what cost? The energy
sector likely affects a greater area than any other activity except agriculture. It seems there is nothing we wonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do, no landscape too precious
to exploit for energy production. Even as landscapes across the globe
are blighted in the mad rush for more energy to fuel growth, billions of
people on Earth still have little or no access to energy resources that
could improve their health and prospects for the future.

CANADA

In many ways, the world’s coal reserves only make our energy problems worse, because they give us
a false sense of security: if we run out of gas and oil, we can just switch over to coal; if we can figure
out a way to “clean” coal, we can have a cheap, plentiful source of energy. In reality, however, facing
the twin challenges of the end of oil and coming of global warming is going to require reinventing
the infrastructure of modern life. The most dangerous thing about our continued dependence on
coal is not what it does to our lungs, our mountains, and even our climate, but what it does to our
minds: it preserves the illusion that we don’t have to change our thinking. —Jeff Goodell

U.s.a.

In Southern West Virginia we live in a war zone. Three and one-half million pounds of explosives are being used
every day to blow up the mountains. Blasting our communities, blasting our homes, poisoning us, trying to intimidate
us. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t mind being poor. I mind being blasted and poisoned. There are no jobs on a dead planet. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Judy Bonds

Appalachia, u.s.a.

The environmental crisis can be viewed as a tree with two trunks. One trunk represents what we are doing to the planet through
atmospheric accumulation of heat-trapping gases. Follow this trunk along and you find droughts, floods, acidification of oceans,
dissolving coral reefs, and species extinctions. The other trunk represents what we are doing to ourselves and other animals
through the chemical adulteration of the planet with inherently toxic synthetic pollutants.â&#x20AC;Ś At the base of both these trunks
is an economic dependency on fossil fuels, primarily coal (plant fossils) and petroleum (animal fossils). â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Sandra Steingraber

JAPAN

Destroying wild rivers with large dams in order to generate electricity is one of the clearer
examples of a false solution to humanity’s “need” for energy. Modernity has unnecessarily
inflated this need; given the severe negative environmental impacts of electricity
generation in general, it is amazing how superfluously and frivolously this form of energy
is utilized. At this point in human history, our capacity to have blind spots regarding truly
life-or-death issues has become one of our most prominent traits. —Juan Pablo Orrego

china

All of our current environmental problems are unanticipated harmful consequences of our existing
technology. There is no basis for believing that technology will miraculously stop causing new and
unanticipated problems while it is solving the problems that it previously produced. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jared Diamond

CANADA

We have reached a point of crisis with regard to energy, a point where the contradictions inherent in our growthbased energy system are becoming untenable, and where its deferred costs are coming due. The essential
problem is not just that we are tapping the wrong energy sources (though we are), or that we are wasteful and
inefficient (though we are), but that we are overpowered, and we are overpowering nature. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Richard Heinberg

SAudi arabia

So the big question about nuclear “revival” isn’t just who’d pay for such a turkey, but
also… why bother? Why keep on distorting markets and biasing choices to divert
scarce resources from the winners to the loser—a far slower, costlier, harder, and riskier
niche product—and paying a premium to incur its many problems? —Amory Lovins

FUKUSHIMA, JAPAN

FOUL WATER

Water is life. Without it, we perish. Clean water and healthy seas are
fundamental to the future welfare of humanity, and yet the industrial
growth economy wastes copious amounts of water and treats the living
oceans as a dumping ground for our effluent. This distain may stem, at
least in part, from an old mythâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;the idea that the seas were limitless and
their abundance immune to the efforts of people. That may have been
true when we were few and our tools were simple. It is not true today
when we are overabundant and no part of the ocean is out of reach
of industrial fishers. The aggregate demands of a bloated humanity on
freshwater systems leave less and less room for nature and put billions
of people at risk of having inadequate drinking water.

CHINA

Good water, good life. Poor water, poor life. No water, no life. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Sir Peter Blake

india

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Loren Eisley

CHINA

Think of Alberta as the Nigeria of the North. (Well, there are a lot more white people in Alberta,
and Canada’s military hasn’t killed anybody to protect the oil business.) Both economies have
been increasingly dominated by oil. In 2009 Nigeria exported around 2.1 million barrels of oil per
day; Canada exported 1.9 million barrels per day. Environmental regulation of the oil industry in
both Nigeria and Alberta is lax, and the industry has been actively opposed by Native people—
the Ogoni, in particular, in Nigeria and the Cree in Alberta. —Winona LaDuke and Martin Curry

CANADA

We have traditionally regarded sin as being merely what people do to other people. Yet, for human beings to destroy the
biological diversity in God’s creation; for human beings to degrade the integrity of the earth by contributing to climate
change, by stripping the earth of its natural forests or destroying its wetlands; for human beings to contaminate the earth’s
waters, land and air—all of these are sins. —Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Head of the Greek Orthodox Church

India

Although biologists are at a loss to explain the most recent algae bloom, scientists suspect
it is connected to pollution and increased seaweed farming . . . While similar green tides
have been reported around the world, the annual bloom in the Yellow Sea is considered
the largest, growing to an estimated million tons of biomass each year. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Andrew Jacobs

China

We must realize that not only does every area have a limited carrying capacityâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;but also that this
carrying capacity is shrinking and the demand growing. Until this understanding becomes an
intrinsic part of our thinking and wields a powerful influence on our formation of national and
international policies we are scarcely likely to see in what direction our destiny lies. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;William Vogt

GULF OF MEXICO

DARKENING SKIES

The air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions that are dumped into
the global atmosphere at no cost to the polluters are, in the lexicon of
economics, â&#x20AC;&#x153;externalities.â&#x20AC;? The reality of course is that we all pay in the
end through shortened lives, increased health care expenses, and the
quickly rising ecological and social costs of a disrupted climate. A universal human experience is to look skyward at the heavens and to feel
a sense of wonder. With the very atmospheric chemistry of the planet
altered by our polluting, fossil fuel-based energy economy, will future
generations look skyward with hope or with fear?

canada

In a few decades, the relationship between the environment, resources, and conflict may seem almost as
obvious as the connection we see today between human rights, democracy and peace. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Wangari Maathai

IRAn

Air pollution (and its fallout on soil and water) is a form of domestic chemical and biological warfare. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Ralph Nader

United Kingdom

Most men, it appears to me, do not care for Nature, and would sell their share in all her beauty, for as long as
they may live, for a stated and not very large sum. Thank God they cannot yet fly and lay waste the sky as well
as the earth. We are safe on that side for the present. It is for the very reason that some do not care for these
things that we need to combine to protect all from the vandalism of the few. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Henry David Thoreau (1862)

New zealand

We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Blaise Pascal

China

CLIMATE chaos

Global climate change may be the purest expression of humanityâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s toxic effect
on the biosphere. The unintended consequence of fossil fuel use and habitat
destruction (especially of natural carbon-sequestering forests and grasslands),
climate change is now observable, is measureable, and portends to get much
worse. Steadily rising global temperature and accelerating greenhouse-gas
emissions should be a clarion call to action. A few governments have heard
that call and are seriously attempting to become carbon-neutral nations; most
are dithering and some are actively obstructing collective climate solutions.
Almost no one in a position of influence forthrightly makes the common sense
linkage between overpopulation and climate change, noting the impossibility of
solving the climate crisis without stabilizing, and then beginning to reverse, the
human demographic trajectory.

INDIA

Prophesying catastrophe is incredibly banal. The more original move is to assume that it has already happened. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Jean Baudrillard

Caption Place Date Social jusice rally, Cairo,
norway
Egypt

There are many ways in which we wound wild Earth and kill wild things. But behind
them all is Man swarm—our population boom. Even in the short run, we cannot
keep wilderness and wildlife without stopping Man’s growth. Furthermore, it
is nothing less than a lie we tell ourselves that we can stop climatic weirdness
without lowering how many we are on the Earth. —Dave Foreman

Gulf of mexico

The effect of climatic disruption now gathering momentum is a tsunami of change that will roll across every corner of the Earth,
affect every sector of every society, and worsen problems of insecurity, hunger, poverty, and societal instability. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;David Orr

philippines

The island is full of holes and seawater is coming through these, flooding areas that werenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t normally flooded 10 or 15 years
ago. There are projections of about 50 years [before the islands disappear]. After this, we will be drowned. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Paani Laupepa

MALDIVES

The Arctic situation is snowballing: dangerous changes in the Arctic derived from accumulated
anthropogenic greenhouse gases lead to more activities conducive to further greenhouse
gas emissions. This situation has the momentum of a runaway train. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Carlos Duarte

norway

Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones,
floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s easy to imagine a future in
which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by
disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;Naomi Klein

COLORADO SPRINGS, U.s.a.

What has become clear from the science is that we cannot burn all of
the fossil fuels without creating a very different planet. â&#x20AC;&#x201D;James Hansen

PAKISTAN

LORD MAN

parable REDUX

Facing the stark choice to continue his futile quest to bend the Earth to his will . . .

or to rejoin the community of life, Lord Man renounced the goal of empire, and was no more.

People around the globe began to remember the old ways, before humans behaved
as if the Earth was merely a storehouse of resources for them.

The people looked to the landscapes around them to inform their culture and shape their ways of living.

They valued the other members in the land community, giving them space enough to flourish in their own ways.

Knowledge and tools for family planning were universally shared.

People began to restrain their numbers, with smaller families becoming a key to societal well being.

Children were allowed to be children, not forced into marriages with adults.

All the children were loved, and all were encouraged to follow their dreams.

Actions were judged ethical or not by whether they helped sustain beauty, biodiversity, and health.

The people chose lives of quality, with sufficient time for the activities and relationships that gave them joy.

Eventually the people forgot the dark days when theyâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;d sought to rule,
and they honored their new relationship with the Earth.

Whales, unmolested, sang in the deep.

The sounds of leaves rustling and children laughing settled over the land, and the tree of life grew toward the sky.

Afterword

Choosing A Planet of Life
Eileen Crist

ONE OF THE COMMONPLACES of environmental writing
these days is a population forecast of 10 billion (or more) people
by century’s end. Indeed, this projection is endlessly repeated, as
if it were as inevitable as the calculable trajectory of an asteroid
hurtling through space. Besides being a facile meme amenable
to replication, this recurrent demographic report signals a widely
shared fatalism: The coming growth has too much inertia behind
it, and is far too politically sensitive, to question. At the same time,
the projection reinforces a collective impression that nothing
can be done to change it. Ironically, the incantation of “10 billion”
seems at work as self-fulfilling prophecy, for without concerted,
proactive intervention it is roughly the number to be expected; so
do we hypnotize and propel ourselves in the predicted direction.
Environmental analysts have divergent responses to this
particular figure (which is the latest United Nations estimate).
Some are incredulous that such a number can be approached—
let alone sustained—and contend that the consequences of
moving in that direction will be disastrous; a catastrophe or
combination of catastrophes is bound to derail professional
demographers’ expectations, and humanity (after enduring much
suffering, or perhaps experiencing some kind of wake-up call)
will stabilize at lower numbers. But other environmental observers,
describing themselves as more optimistic, are endeavoring to
figure out strategies that might sustain the expected billions.
They hope that with the right developments and innovations in
crop genetics, irrigation technologies, fertilizer application
(“responsible nutrient management”), efficiency gains (including
closing “yield gaps” and curbing food waste), requisite energy
transitions, and other advances, the planet might feed, provide
water for, house, educate, and medicate—at an acceptable
standard of living for all—the coming 10. There is reason to
wager, they maintain, that humanity might succeed at the task,
since people are resourceful, determined, and apt to get out of a
tight spot even in the nick of time.

Thus where some see disaster on the immediate horizon, others
submit that with another techno-managerial turn of the screw
humanity might avert grim penalties to population growth. Yet
despite considerable divergence in outlook, all environmental
analysts agree that (even as our global numbers continue to
climb) we face grueling challenges, each immense in its own
right but dizzying in their unpredictable synergies: biodiversity
destruction, climate change, freshwater depletion, ceilings on
agricultural productivity, all manner of pollution, topsoil loss, and
ocean acidification to mention some prominent examples.
Rather than taking sides between the forecast of impending
tragedy versus optimism about “feeding the world,” there is another
way to tell the near future’s story. On that telling, the issue is not
whether it is possible for 10 billion people to eat industrial food,
commune with iPhones, and make a decent living on planet Earth
(an outlying scenario, in my view, but perhaps stranger things have
happened in the universe). The point to focus on instead is that
a world of so many billions does not, in any case, turn out well:
Because such a world is only possible by taking a spellbindingly
life-abundant planet and turning it into a human food plantation,
gridded with industrial infrastructures, webbed densely by networks
of high-traffic global trade and travel, in which remnants of
natural areas—simulacra or residues of wilderness—are zoned for
ecological services and ecotourism. In such a world, cruise ships
with all-you-can-eat buffets will circumnavigate seas stripped of
their plenitude of living beings, on waters awash with plastic refuse
decomposing into bite-sized and eventually microscopic particles
destined for incorporation into the worldwide food web.
What’s more, a sustainable geopolitical status quo of 10 billion
consumers will require comprehensive mega-technological
support: offshore dike projects; more dams (already, according
to a 2009 Yale Environment 360 report, being constructed
at “a furious pace”); desalinization plant construction with

accompanying transport infrastructures; scaling-up of industrial
aquaculture; genetic modification of crops and animals to adapt
to climatic and consumer demands; cultivating so-called marginal
lands to grow grasses and other plants for biofuels; the spread of
the fracking scourge (globalizing “the oil and shale-gas boom”);
climate engineering at global and regional scales; and the spread
and normalization of factory farms. (The Economist praises the
efficiency of the latter institution over traditional husbandry,
calling it—in apparent oblivion of the term’s Orwellian malodor—
“the livestock revolution.”)
In such a world corporations are likely to continue reigning
supreme, for the coming technological gigantism (not to
mention the escalation of mass consumption) will make them
indispensable. Corporate expertise and products will be required
to keep the biosphere on permanent “dialysis,” to borrow a fitting
metaphor from James Lovelock. Corporations will continue
generating enormous revenues, via tax-based subsidies for their
“public works” and by catering their products to huge numbers of
people. (Any doubt regarding the relationship between privatesector opulence and consumer population size is dispelled
by taking note of the correlation between today’s wealthiest
companies and their bulging middle-class client base. Indeed,
capitalism is quite partial to the twin perks of population growth:
cheap labor and mass clientele.) Whatever relatively natural
places remain will be slated as the real estate and vacation
destinations of the most affluent—as they are to a large degree
today. But regardless of whether or not corporations and the
gilded class entrench their reign, everyone (including the rich) will
be wretchedly dispossessed, hustling for happiness on a planet
degraded to serve a bloated, user-species.
In such a world—whatever it augurs for humanity, which seems
bleak to say the least—the exuberance of Life will suffer a
tremendous blow. This Life is barely hanging on in the present
world; it will not survive a world that is a magnified version
of the one we live in. I use the word Life, with capital L, to
mean something akin to what life scientists call “biodiversity”;
unfortunately, though, the latter term is often mistakenly conflated
with numbers of species on Earth. While numbers of species
are a significant dimension of Life’s fecundity, Life is far greater
than a total species inventory—as extravagant as that inventory

may be. Life is bewildering in its creative expressions, its beauty,
strangeness, and unexpectedness, its variety of physical types
and kinds of awareness, and its dynamic, burgeoning, and
interweaving world-making.
Earth’s story is about Life, whose phenomena emerge in each
place uniquely and over the whole planet diversely, always
contiguous and interconnected at local, regional, and global levels.
Life fills niches and also creates them; life-forms accommodate
other life-forms via niche construction and by their edible,
breathable, or otherwise consumable waste by-products (including,
ultimately, their own corpses). With the exception of mass
extinction events, Life is always enabling more of itself to surge.
There’s ceaseless feeding on one another and on each other’s
by-products, as well as a co-molding of a physical and chemical
environment in which more life is supported to flourish. Importantly,
a vast array of life-forms—from all five kingdoms of life—are
involved in building soil, which is not only Life’s foundation but itself
a living phenomenon. Through organism-mediated processes, the
land brings nutrients to the seas, and the seas (through organismmediated processes) return nutrients to the land. Forest canopies
feed the life in the understory, and life in the forest understory
feeds the trees and all who live in their canopies. Beings in the
seas’ upper layers sustain the strange menagerie of abyssal
creatures, and organism-created nutrients in the depths well up
and nourish fellow beings in the upper zones.
In the “interdisciplinary” dance of Life—where phenomena of
physics, organismal biology, biochemistry, behavior, awareness,
and chaos jostle in established and spontaneous patterns—Life
creates abundance. For example, hundreds of millions of eggs
wash to the sea’s edge, feeding multitudes before a fraction
develop into the organisms that spawned them. Prey species
proliferate wildly in response to the pressure of their predators—
incalculable numbers of marine creatures once sustained the
tens (and perhaps hundreds) of millions of sharks and whales
who existed before their concerted extermination began.
Enormous, ever-on-the-move ungulate herds do not decimate the
lush grasslands that feed them, but on the contrary the grasses
grow because of them, and the animals and grasses (with other
life-forms) together create more soil. Freely moving, pristine
rivers teemed with fish even in recent history. Great flocks of

birds graced skies, wetlands, and seashores. And land, sea, and
air animal migrations have not only told the seasons’ stories but
contributed to bringing the seasons into being. The intermingled
manifestations of Life on Earth—when Earth is allowed to
manifest them—have no finitude.
As for a popularized claim that, alas, life is all about struggle,
competition, and selfishness, it is best to turn away from such
claptrap: for it is only within a planet of Life, a Life-world, that
phenomena of struggle, competition, and selfishness arise and
pass away in their relevant contexts. The Life-world itself is far
more encompassing in the kinds of phenomena it manifests and
cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional schema. Except for the
one thing we know in the marrow of our bones and in our hearts:
that the Life-world is All-good.
And here’s the crux of the matter: Humanity can choose to live
on a planet of Life instead of haplessly plunging toward a humancolonized planet on dialysis (“wisely managed”). To live on a
planet of Life it is necessary to limit ourselves so as to allow the
biosphere freedom to express its ecological and evolutionary arts.
For that, we in turn need to cultivate the breadth of imagination
to give the concept of freedom wider scope—pushing its territory
beyond the sheath of human exclusivity. In the name of a higher
freedom that encompasses Earth and its entire community of
beings, we can choose to let the world be the magnificence and
wealth it was and still can be. Borrowing words from nature writer
Julia Whitty’s Deep Blue Home, this path is about cultivating
intimacy with the natural world, taking as our lover the way things
really are and finding our way home.
But the wisdom of limitations—of our numbers, economies, and
places of habitation—is rarely entertained in mainstream thought
for what it is: the elegant way home and the surest means for
addressing the deepening (and likely self-endangering) problems
of extinctions, ecosystem destruction and simplification, rapid
climate change, freshwater and topsoil depletions, as well as
(relatedly) mounting concerns about “feeding the world.” The
path of limitations is rarely entertained, for it is assumed to be
unrealistic and thus politically inexpedient. But knowledge of the
multiple stresses on the biosphere, along with an understanding
of the adverse, volatile ways these may compound one another,

yield the recognition that drastically scaling down the human
project is the most realistic approach to imminent catastrophes.
If political expediency cannot see that, then political expediency
and those who speak for it need to be deposed so we can get on
with the real work.

IN THE MEANTIME, even as the available option of limitations
is bypassed as ostensibly unrealistic, the prevailing question
voiced with increasingly shrill urgency is: Can the Earth feed
10 billion people? By most expert accounts, because of
population growth along with the rise of meat and animal product
consumption, food production will have to double by 2050 to
meet demand—and the big question is: Can it be done? There
is an effort under way to figure this out, by experimenting in
research and development labs, working in research stations,
and analyzing agricultural databases. And because it is well
known that most (and certainly the most fertile) arable lands are
already in cultivation, and that the areas where wild creatures
live are already pushed to their limits, the effort to increase
food production (to double it in about forty years and triple it by
century’s end) is invariably escorted by the caveat that it must
be done without “further damage to biodiversity” or “taking over
more uncultivated lands.”
Since at least the early 2000s, this “ecologically correct” sound
bite has been activated in environmental writings, journalistic
reports, and corporate web pages: We must produce more
crops (for food, feed, and fuel), as well as more meat and animal
products, by means of careful planning and management, with
minimal additional ecological impacts. Oddly, the latter disclaimer
is stated as if tropical forests are not today giving way to soybean
monocultures, cattle ranches, and oil palm, sugar, tea, and
other plantations; as if large-scale acquisitions recruiting land
in Africa and elsewhere are not already under way in the name
of “food security”; as if marine life is not being chewed up by
the industrial machine; and as if rivers are not today so taxed
by damming, extraction, diversion, and pollution that the crisis of
freshwater Life may well be the gravest extinction site on Earth
(a big nonevent as far as the public and its elected officials are
concerned). Despite all these things happening already today (in
a global economy of 7.3 billion), those at work to figure out if food

production can be doubled and eventually tripled (to serve a world
of 9, 10, or more billion in an intensified global economy) always
add that it must be done without additional ecological damage.
When we encounter such pious declarations of intent we’d do
well to recall Hamlet’s sardonic response to the question, “What
do you read?” Words, words, words.
Those endeavoring to figure out how to increase food production
without more harms to nature may well be sincere; but they appear
to be in the throes of wishful thinking. For even if for a moment
we ignore the fact that present-day industrial agriculture, industrial
aquaculture, and industrial fishing constitute a mounting planetwide disaster—which goes largely unremarked only because it is
nigh equaled by planet-wide unawareness—simply saying that we
need to grow more food without further ecological destruction
is not going to stop hungry and acquisitive people from taking
what they need and think they need: clearing more forests and
grasslands, moving up slopes, overgrazing pasture and rangelands,
decimating sea creatures, replacing mangrove forests with shrimp
operations, or killing wild animals for cash or food.
Even so, the most pernicious thing about this formulaic mandateplus-caveat—grow more food, don’t damage more nature—has yet
to be stated: namely, that it insinuates that the current damage our
food system inflicts is acceptable and irreversible. Hands down,
however, food production is the most ecologically devastating
enterprise on Earth. (More on this shortly.) Yet mainstream
discourses do not tend to flag the food system’s earth-shattering
demands on the biosphere. Instead, the current ability to produce
ample amounts of food—enough for all, including those not yet at
the table—appears to merit a different cluster of conclusions: that
humanity’s food-producing capacity is not constrained by natural
limits; that we may be able to stretch that productivity even further
via managerial and technological innovations; and that Homo
sapiens is unlike all other species, who are checked by nature
whenever their numbers exceed the capacity of the environment
to sustain them. Indeed, the belief that humans are exempt from
any natural “carrying capacity” is a cornerstone of the mission to
continue expanding food production to support the coming billions.
The demographic idea of carrying capacity refers to the maximal
population of a species that its environment can support, without

that environment becoming too degraded to support the species
in the future. If a species, for some reason or other, does exceed
its carrying capacity—with numbers mounting beyond what the
natural setting can sustain—the consequences are implacable:
starvation, disease, and death follow, until the population is
brought back within a supportable range. While this natural law of
the relationship between population size and sustenance appears
broadly applicable in the animal kingdom, here’s the key point
regarding human exemption: It is widely believed that history has
shown that it does not apply to us.
In the early nineteenth century the Reverend Thomas Robert
Malthus, in his Essay on the Principle of Population, endeavored
to apply the logic of natural limits, and the severe costs of
transgressing them, to humanity. He predicted that because
population grows faster than food production, human numbers
would outstrip the available food supply and people would reap
the woes of famine, disease, and war. But the two centuries
following his analysis did not see a human population crash,
as food production kept up with mounting numbers of people;
in fact, during the last half of the twentieth century the rate of
food production even outpaced the rate of population growth.
So Malthus’s thesis came to be viewed as repudiated, and the
doctrine of human exemptionalism from natural limits received a
victorious boost.
Indeed, the foreboding forecast that the human population would
inevitably exceed the amount of available food to (at least in
principle) feed everyone did not come to pass. It was refuted by
converting Earth’s most fertile lands for agriculture (after being
denuded of their Life-rich forests, grasslands, and wetlands);
by taking over extensive swaths of natural areas for domestic
animal grazing; by appropriating half the world’s freshwater—with
the biggest share diverted for agriculture; by applying enormous
quantities of synthetic chemical and fertilizer pollutants; and
by plundering untold numbers of wild fish. In other words, the
prediction of human tribulation in the wake of unsustainable
numbers was refuted by means of the near conversion of the
biosphere into a human-food pantry.
The seemingly “winning argument” that humanity is uniquely
capable of keeping food production apace with (or ahead of)

demographic growth reveals a profound lack of insight into the
bigger picture of what stretching our food-producing capacity
has really portended. It reveals an inability to appreciate—or
even to entertain as a passing thought—that human carrying
capacity (how many people the Earth can support) has been
extended not simply because we are so clever at manipulating
natural processes and inventing stuff, but through forcefully
taking over the carrying capacity of other life-forms and, in the
process, wiping them out regionally or globally. Moreover, the
exemptionalism thereby displayed—that we are not bound by
natural conditions like other species—beyond the superficial
“fact” that it seems to be, serves conveniently as an ideological
handmaiden of human expansionism. For what the doctrine of
exemptionalism tacitly conveys and inculcates is that because
humanity is so special by comparison to all other creatures, it is
proportionately that much more entitled; and thus the acts of war
on the natural world that undergird our expansionism (for food
production in particular) become unrecognizable as acts war.
The question of whether ultimately there are (or not) natural limits
to our food-producing ability, which will (or not) check human
demographic growth, is not so interesting; the experiment required
for the final verdict is an ugly one either way. Instead, I along with
other deep ecologists invite consideration of something far more
enticing: that by choosing the wisdom of limitations and humility,
humanity can reject life on a planet converted into a human
food factory and allow for the rewilding of vast expanses of the
biosphere’s landscapes and seascapes. To drive home why the
latter option is much more beautiful (as well as more prudent), I
turn to the highlights of how food production is contributing the
lion’s share of anthropogenic ecological havoc.
Cropland uses a portion of the planet the size of South America,
while land for grazing farm animals eats up an even larger share—
an area the size of Africa. Effectively, humanity has seized the
temperate zone for agriculture, wiping out all or most former
nonhumans and ecologies in order to mine the soil. (“How did
they get on top of our soil?”) The raising of tens of billions of
domestics has exacted the eradication or displacement of wild
animals from their former habitats, the persecution and slaughter
of carnivores viewed as threats to farm animals (themselves
reduced to being “live-stock”), and the erosion and degradation

of lands from overgrazing. And the alternative to grazing—The
Economist’s so-called livestock revolution—constitutes a pollution
nightmare and an egregious violation of basic decency in the
treatment of animals. (Yet factory farming is a production method
that today both supplements grazing and is swiftly spreading.)
Regarding the seas, the human food factory has demanded that
98 percent of them be fishable. This reign of terror for marine
species is partly underwritten by an institution called, without
the slightest irony, “the freedom of the seas.” As a consequence,
only about 10 percent of the big fish are left and there is no end
in sight to the demand on everything from krill to sharks. In the
literal and figurative industrial mowing of the world’s oceans,
the countless beings who suffer and die in the name of mass
consumption and profit are referred to as “catch” and “bycatch.”
Furthermore, food production contributes at least 30 percent
of anthropogenic greenhouse gases; the latter are driving a
climate change episode that—barring the energy transition
everyone is still waiting for—could egg the planet to an average
temperature increase in the ballpark of the Paleocene-Eocene
Thermal Maximum. (If you have never heard of the PaleoceneEocene Thermal Maximum, please wiki it.) The food factory—the
one often touted as a miracle of ingenuity bestowing the badge
of exemptionalism on Homo sapiens—consumes at least 70
percent of the freshwater taken from ecological watersheds,
thus depriving the nonhumans who called that water home, and
killing or driving them to extinction (in many cases even before
we could meet them). Food production drives soil erosion and
desertification, giving rise to ocean-spanning dust storms. It
also depends on constant applications of pesticides, herbicides,
and other biocides: Indeed, many consumers and growers, alike,
have been duped by corporate salesmen (and their government
allies) into believing that it is normal and necessary to poison
the biosphere for the purpose of producing human nourishment.
Streams, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and estuaries around the world
are fouled or deadened by agricultural runoff and farm animal
excrement—all just “how things have to be” if we are to eat.
This unprecedented impact on the living world allows for the
production of so much food as to seemingly demonstrate our
ability to feed billions and, with some additional resourcefulness,
perhaps feed even more. From a deep ecological perspective,

however, the unprecedented ecological impact demanded for
the production of so much food has demonstrated our capacity
to take a magnificent planet—second to none in the known
universe—and turn it into, or use it as, a human feedlot, and then
muster the arrogance to call this act of pilfering and degradation
an “achievement.”
In his latest work, Countdown, author Alan Weisman sums our
current Green Revolution food system as involving “fossil fuel
gluttony,” “river fouling fertilizers,” “dependence on poisons,” and
“monocultural menace to biodiversity.” So how is the amount
of food we produce to be doubled or more without additional
damage? Remarkably, one of the strategies being considered is
to extend the productivity of Green Revolution methodologies to
places they have not yet reached. Indeed, as the global population
continues to grow, spreading the Green Revolution in order to
“feed the world” will be the likely tack of the present-day policy
framework, which is beholden to (in no particular order) corporate
interests, institutional inertia, and acute anthropocentrism.
Predictably, the call to extend the Green Revolution is cushioned
by all the ecologically correct pleas for wiser uses of water,
more efficient application of fertilizers, prudent deployment of
pesticides and herbicides, inclusion of no-till agriculture, and so
forth: an appeal to “greening” the Green Revolution that not only
is politic but also constitutes necessary retooling in a time of
potential phosphate shortages, water wars, and fossil fuel price
hikes. But making a destructive food model more efficient does
not the model make good. At best it yields a world—as Rachel
Carson so cuttingly put it—that is not quite lethal.

I HAVE DIGRESSED into the ecological discontents of
humanity’s current food production in order to submit the
following: that the social mission to double or triple it is madness.
But the proposal to move deliberately in the direction of more
than halving our global population, and simultaneously radically
changing our food system, is not.
If women (and their partners) today were voluntarily to choose
having an average of one child (meaning many would choose
none, many one, and others no more than two), then the world’s
population—instead of climbing toward 10 billion—would stabilize

and then begin descending toward 2. Were the current generation
of childbearing women to embrace this voluntary mandate for
the sake of a living planet and the quality of life (perhaps even
survival) of future people, how could this possibly be construed as
a sacrifice? It is intelligent and compassionate action that many
people would be willing to take if they became properly informed
and knowledgeable about the planetary emergency we are in. As
for those who hear “coercion” in such a proposal—and respond by
defending “human reproductive rights”—they should at least take
a moment to acknowledge a fact that population experts are well
aware of: that some of the grossest violations of human rights are
perpetrated in societies that force women to start (involuntarily)
having children when they are barely beyond childhood themselves,
and to continue reproducing until their bodies give way or they
are no longer fertile. The population question is indeed pressing
in countries where patriarchic, polygamous, fundamentalist, and
military cultures are keeping women handcuffed and thus adding
roadblocks to a restored future.
Yet population size is not strictly a “developing world” problem
but a global issue and task. One of the most effective and
tangible ways to address climate disruption, as well as to curb the
excessive consumption of everything (including food), is to move
toward the substantial reduction of the number of consumers
worldwide, meaning both the populations of the developed
world and of “emerging economies” in Asia, Southeast Asia, and
Latin America. Concerning the developed world’s responsibility
in addressing overpopulation, it is also reasonable to insist that
monetarily affluent nations and institutions should provision the
financial backing and expertise for bringing state-of-the-art
reproductive health services around the world—including their
home territories. For example, half the pregnancies that occur
in the United States are unintended—a statistic that speaks to a
social, cultural, and educational failure not just to a weakness of
human nature. The important work of demographic expert Robert
Engelman has shown that if unintended pregnancies (everywhere)
were reduced to a humanly possible minimal, this would lead to a
reduction in both population size and numbers of abortions.
Wherever concerted policies to lower birthrates have been
implemented, birthrates have declined with alacrity. By concerted
policies I include the following: prominent, unembarrassed

public discourse and campaigning on the issue; prioritizing the
education of girls and women; establishing reproductive clinics
that are accessible and affordable to all; training large numbers
of health workers for grassroots education and support; making
marriage counseling widely available; bringing sex education to
school curricula; providing the full array of modern contraceptive
methods for free or at minimal cost; and instituting legal, safe
abortion services. On the latter controversial point, it needs
to be added that implementing all the above measures would
significantly lower the number of abortions worldwide as well as
the number of deaths from slipshod, illicit abortions.
The combination of heightened public awareness, the
empowerment of women, and the availability and affordability
of up-to-date reproductive information and services yields swift
declines in birthrates. Such declines have nothing to do with the
imposition of some top-down coercion; rather, they follow from
a straightforward bio-cultural cause: that the vast majority of
women, when they attain free choice, rarely want more than one
or two children, because numerous offspring are hard on the
female organism and also take time away from other personal
pursuits. As the peerless work of population analyst Martha
Campbell has shown, this natural female propensity for few
offspring surfaces straight away, once barriers to reproductive
services are removed and freedom of choice becomes reality.
If, additionally, today’s fertile women were presented with the
beautiful and compassionate mandate to help alleviate the
world’s most pressing ecological and social problems, then the
average fertility rate might well shrink even further. Does this
sound unreasonable? Certainly not more so than the unthinkable
mission to double or triple food production, which augurs a
colonized and ecologically impoverished biosphere, haunted by
scarcity, and possibly marauded by nasty social mayhem to boot.
Bringing our global population down to, say, 2 billion will not be
the magic bullet that solves every ecological and social problem.
But we can rest assured that it will be a magic bullet for doing so.
Significantly lowering our numbers facilitates a more harmonious
way of life on Earth in at least two ways. First, many problems—
from traffic jams, to health care budgets, to climate change—
become more tractable as the dimension that magnifies them is
curtailed. Lowering our numbers, in other words, helps downscale

harms: For example, there is a yawning difference between a
world of 1 billion vehicles (causing damage enough) versus a
world of 2, 3, or 4 billion vehicles (the direction we are headed).
There is also a vast difference between urban settlements
beautified and balanced by an abundance of open, green spaces
versus the nightmare of unending road, housing, and strip-mall
construction to serve the glutton of sprawl.
The second way in which significantly lowering our global
population supports the turn to what we might call “beautiful
human habitation” involves food production: A lower population
will make possible the radical transformation of an industrial
food regime that is currently bludgeoning ecologies, wild and
domestic animals, and human wellness. (Four leading causes of
disease and death are linked to industrial food, and especially to
the consumption of mass-produced, low-quality animal products:
heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and stroke.) The whole world
can indeed be fed: with organically grown, nutritious food; by
prioritizing local and regional food economies; without mining,
polluting, and dispersing the soil but by caring for it and building
it; through diversified, smaller-scale farm operations modeled
on natural ecosystems; in lovely and fecund interfaces with wild
nature (“farming with the wild”); and by forsaking high quantities
of animal foods, for the occasional consumption of such foods
produced with due consideration to ethical and nutritional values.
This wholesome turn only becomes possible if our global numbers
are far lower than today’s.
We need an authentic green revolution. Instead of holding
demographic growth as given, and a biosphere-wrecking food
system as normal, let’s imagine what the world might look
like if we renounced both. And if the world would look more
beautiful and sane with expansive rewilding; with abundant food,
ecologically and ethically produced; with streams, rivers, lakes,
and estuaries returned to being living waters; with deforestation
halted and grassland ecologies reinstated; with the extinction
crisis arrested and seas thriving again with Life; and with climate
change made more manageable via carbon-sequestering forests
and grasslands and decelerated emissions. If all these things
can be achieved, what is keeping us from pursuing such a
world? Indeed, what is detaining us from creating a civilization in
harmony with wild Earth?

Boys: Flood-affected children in Pakistan
stand in a queue to get food relief; Reuters.

FOREWORD

Musimbi Kanyoro

We are one human race living on one planet. We aspire for the
same things: food, water, good health, and most of all dignity
and loving relationships. We yearn for opportunity, voice, and
resources to develop our potential. We want to raise our children
in a safe and healthy environment. We want to experience the
Earth’s beauty and natural bounty.
Realizing our common humanity invites us to embrace common
responsibility and to care for one another and the planet on
which we live. The emergence of such grave global challenges
as biodiversity loss and climate change demands our urgent and
undivided attention. The health of the oceans, the air, the water, and
the land affects human health. The size of the human family and
the way that we live influence the quality of life for people today as
well as for future generations. Moreover, our numbers and behavior
profoundly affect nonhuman species, all of the creatures with which
we share this beautiful but finite planet. The web of life that these
species create is what makes the Earth habitable and lovely.

foreword

We know that rapid population growth exacerbates social,
economic, and ecological problems—whether in rich or poor
countries, north or south. Most important, rapid population growth
is a fundamental driver of individual as well as societal problems
that deny dignity to many, and especially to women who bear
the burden of reproduction and caretaking of communities.
We have the knowledge to reduce these burdens thoughtfully
by using rights-based, culturally appropriate ways to slow
population growth while enhancing human dignity and thoughtful
development. Taking action in this way is important for my
country, Kenya, as it is for all other nations. This is what the world
needs to do today and not tomorrow.

This urgency strikes home when looking through the images in
this powerful book. Who can say, with an honest heart, that the
suffering of the Earth and millions of her children is not linked to
exponential population growth?
I have devoted most of my professional life to advocating for and
advancing the universality of human rights, the rights of women
and girls, and the rights of poor people. I am neither naïve about
the complexity of factors affecting public policy, nor about the
imbalance of power, voice, and resources across nations, genders,
generations, and cultures. Yet, I sincerely believe that family
planning is a human right that yields multiple benefits for women,
children, poor people—ultimately for all humanity. It helps sustain
a mother’s health and gives women choices beyond childbearing.
Well-spaced children are healthier and fewer children per family
help their parents to better support their growth and development.
All these step-by-step and one-person-at-a-time actions add up
to immense social good when implemented on a large scale.
The core ethic that unites all of us in relation to family planning
is a respect for individual autonomy. Family planning is not
about telling people what to do but about listening to what
they want. Over 200 million couples around the world want to
limit the number of children they have, but they are not using
contraception, and every woman wants and deserves a safe
delivery. A safe and legitimate way to reduce population growth
is to make family planning and access to safe motherhood
universally available in a human rights framework.

PARABLE

While the complexities and challenges of achieving this are quite
real, the problem of rapid population growth requires that leaders

Cars: In the overdeveloped world, car
culture and consumer culture are joined
at the bumper. At an auction site in
Sandwich, Kent, UK, thousands of cars
are lined up to sell; Alamy.

Assembly Line: In a globalized economy,
resource extraction and production may
occur a world away from where products
are marketed and sold. Here factory
workers stuff Cabbage Patch Dolls in
Shenzhen, China;
Wally McNamee/Corbis.

Paws: Trafficking in wildlife parts is
big business, and contributes to the
pressure on various imperiled species.
Two Russians were arrested for
smuggling 213 bear paws into China
at a China–Russia land border, 2013;
Reuters.

Red River: The Jian River river became
apocalyptic in character when red dye
was dumped into the storm water pipe
network, reportedly by two illegal dye
workshops in Luoyang, Henan province,
China; STR/AFP/Getty Images.

Algae Beach: Likely linked to fertilizer
runnoff, algae blooms along the
coastline of Qingdao, Shandong
province, China, are among the largest
ever recorded. Bathers, apparently,
are not deterred from swimming in the
algae-fouled waters; Reuters.

Oil Refinery: Necessary infrastructure
in the globalized petroleum economy,
oil refineries (such as this one in Saudi
Arabia) also are significant sources of air
polution; Alamy.

Nuclear Meltdown: The 2011 accident
at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear
Station in Japan galvanized the world’s
attention and again highlighted the risks
of nuclear power. As of 2013 it was
reported that the damaged plant was still
leaking radioactive water into the Pacific
Ocean. Mainichi Newspapers/AFLO.

Kids: All children should be safe, loved,
and have the opportunity experience
nature’s beauty; Corbis.

Local Produce: Women vendors work
behind their vegetable display at a
marketplace in Chosica, Peru, near Lima;
Alamy.

Contributors

Musimbi Kanyoro, president and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, is
a champion for human rights, the health of women and girls, and socialchange-centered philanthropy. Born in Kenya, Kanyoroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s international
experience in the field of sexual and reproductive health and rights spans
more than three decades. Prior to her current position, she was the
director of the Population and Reproductive Health program of the David
and Lucile Packard Foundation.

William Ryerson is founder and president of Population Media Center
and also serves as CEO of the Population Institute in Washington, DC.
He has a 40-year history of working in the field of reproductive health,
including two decades of experience adapting the Sabido methodology of
social change communications to various cultural settings worldwide.

Eileen Crist teaches in the Department of Science and Technology
in Society at Virginia Tech. She is author of Images of Animals:
Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind and coeditor of Gaia in Turmoil, Life
on the Brink: Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation, and Keeping
the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth.

Global Population Speak Out

Visit the Global Population Speak Out website to add your voice and lend support to a worldwide campaign of activists, population and
development professionals, and ordinary citizens concerned about the enormous size and rapid growth of the human population—and
how these issues affect both the future of people and the ability of other species to flourish. The “Speak Out” is the planet’s leading
population advocacy platform, bridging continents, cultures, and languages to bring together a global community of motivated and
concerned citizens. Right now, future human population dynamics are being decided. Your voice, your spirit, and your creativity can
be the difference between a stabilized and more sustainable human population by mid-century or one that is still rapidly expanding,
unsustainably, by the millions.
Join us: populationspeakout.org.

Population Media Center (PMC) is a nonprofit, international nongovernmental organization, which strives to improve the health and
well-being of people around the world through the use of entertainment-education strategies, such as serialized dramas on radio and
television, in which characters evolve into role models for the audience for positive behavior change. Founded in 1998, PMC has over
15 years of field experience using the Sabido methodology of behavior change communications, positively affecting more than 50
countries around the world.
www.populationmedia.org

The Population Institute (PI) provides essential leadership to promote voluntary family planning and reproductive health services
and increase awareness of the social, economic, and environmental consequences of rapid population growth. Founded in 1969
and based in Washington, DC, PI works to educate policymakers, the media, and the general public about population issues. PI also
recruits and trains tomorrow’s population activists, and national membership networks to address population issues. The Institute
promotes both international and U.S. support for voluntary family planning programs, and supports fullegal, political, economic, and
social equality for women, including sexual and reproductive rights.
www.populationinstitute.org

ÂŠ 2015 Foundation for Deep Ecology
ISBN: 978-1-939621-23-8
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means without permission in writing from the Foundation for
Deep Ecology.
Foundation for Deep Ecology
1606 Union Street, San Francisco,
California 94123
(415) 229-9339
www.deepecology.org
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Distributed by Goff Books, an imprint of ORO Editions.
www.goffbooks.com
info@goffbooks.com
Printed in Hong Kong by XXXX [TK] on paper from sustainably managed forests as certified by the Forest Stewardship Council.

(Foreword) Musimbi Kanyoro, a native of
Kenya, is president and CEO of the Global Fund for
Women. She is a leading champion for human rights,
the health of women and girls, and social-changecentered philanthropy. Kanyoroâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s international
experience in the field of sexual and reproductive
health and rights spans more than three decades. Prior to her current
position, she was the director of the Population and Reproductive Health
program of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
(Introduction) William Ryerson is founder
and president of Population Media Center and
also serves as CEO of the Population Institute
in Washington, D.C. He has a forty-year history
of working in the field of reproductive health,
including two decades of experience adapting
the Sabido methodology of social change communications to various
cultural settings worldwide.
(Afterword) Eileen Crist teaches in the
Department of Science and Technology in Society
at Virginia Tech. She is author of Images of
Animals: Anthropomorphism and Animal Mind
and coeditor of Gaia in Turmoil, Life on the Brink:
Environmentalists Confront Overpopulation and
Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth.

OVER is a centerpiece of the Global Population Speak Out,
a worldwide campaign of activists, population and development
professionals, and ordinary citizens concerned about the enormous size
and rapid growth of the human populationâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and how these issues affect
both the future of people and the ability of other species to flourish.
Learn more at populationspeakout.org.

Sponsoring Organizations
Population Media Center (PMC) is a nonprofit, international
nongovernmental organization, which strives to improve the health and
well-being of people around the world through the use
of entertainment-education strategies, such as serialized dramas
on radio and television, in which characters evolve into role models for
the audience. Founded in 1998, PMC has successfully used behavior
change communications in more than 50 countries.
The Population Institute (PI) provides essential leadership
to promote voluntary family planning and reproductive health services
and increase awareness of the social, economic, and environmental
consequences of rapid population growth. Founded in 1969 and based
in Washington, D.C., PI works to educate policy makers, the media, and
the general public about population issues. The Institute promotes both
international and U.S. support for voluntary family planning programs,
and supports full legal, political, economic, and social equality for
women, including sexual and reproductive rights.